Remembering the Forgotten

THE THREE BOOKS before me on the table share certain qualities: all are concerned with war; all bear that most authentically Australian imprint of Scribe Publications. Two are fresh editions of books which have already won substantial successes. One work is new.

Ross McMullin’s Pompey Elliott appeared first in 2002, to such acclaim that fresh printings were required again in that year, and then in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Gavan Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese has enjoyed international acclaim since it was first published in America in 1994. Scribe issued an Australian edition in 2004, and today a further printing is in the bookshops. Fresh full reviews of two such seasoned veterans are hardly required, though brief reminders may be welcome.

Harold (“Pompey”) Elliott was one of Australia’s greatest fighting citizen-soldiers. His career began in the ranks, during the South African (“Boer”) War, where he won the Distinguished Conduct Medal. In the First World War he served first on Gallipoli, and then on the Western Front in France, where he rose to command a brigade. Even then, he was often “up front” in person, close to the troops in action. His care for his soldiers was legendary, and they in turn idolised their commander, who won several awards. Back again in civil life he was a lawyer, a senator, and a prominent public figure. Yet he was unhappy, touchy, ready to take offence, brooding over any suspected slight. He died by his own hand in 1931.

This life of achievement, colour, celebrity and tragedy has been wonderfully re-created by McMullin, whose insight also sets the life into the wider history of its times. The book is well indexed, with notes and tables helpful both to scholars and plain readers; anyone even generally interested in the first thirty years of Australian Federation could find it a useful reference on their own bookshelves.

Gavan Daws’ Prisoners of the Japanese covers the whole vast territory of the Pacific War, from Manchuria to New Guinea, from Burma to the Central Pacific Islands. The prisoners included Americans, Australians, British, Chinese and Dutch. The “white” and Eurasian captives numbered about 140,000. For all those prisoners, captivity spelt slavery; for about one in four of them it also spelt death: a death which might come in the shape of starvation, disease, medical neglect, beatings, sadistic torture, sword-slash or bayonet-thrust, shooting, hanging or beheading. Or it might come from deliberate working to death (as on the Burma railway); or from being marched to exhaustion to die where they dropped; or upon being cut in pieces without anaesthetic by Japanese “doctors” pursuing their own lines of ghastly medical “research”.

The story, starkly told and meticulously documented by Daws, is a chronicle of four years unrelieved horror—the deeds not of men but of devils. After the armistice, a very few of the Japanese perpetrators were tried by the Allied War Crimes Tribunal; some were hanged or imprisoned, and others committed suicide. But was justice done? And today, should the unspeakable be allowed to slip tactfully into the silence?

By no means. The reign of frightfulness begun in 1941 was deliberate Japanese government policy, conceived ad terrorem and executed with exuberance by the Japanese forces in the field. With few and trifling exceptions, Japan has neither acknowledged nor apologised for its monstrous inhumanities: on the contrary. The perpetrators are honoured in the Yasakuni Shrine; Japanese school history textbooks tiptoe with weasel words around embarrassing truths; Gavan Daws says that in all the 100 volumes of Japan’s official war history there is no mention. Australian soldiers rarely thought well of their commander-in-chief, General Blamey, but they warmed to him at least once: at a surrender ceremony in the field, at which he presided; his message to the Japanese commander was (in effect) that Blamey was not accepting the sword of a surrendered but chivalrous foe; he was simply taking a weapon from a mongrel.

In Europe, the Holocaust deeply stained German national honour. By acknowledgment, apology and gestures of reparation, Germans opened the door to their own readmission as a civilised nation. As recently as a couple of months ago their Chancellor, Angela Merkel, made a state visit to Jerusalem to lay a wreath at a new monument to the Holocaust’s victims.

For over six decades, the Chinese have striven for some similar sign of contrition from Japan—to no avail. Year after year, Japanese textbooks reproduce their same untruthful story. Now perhaps, with the support of his stout friends in Beijing, Mr Rudd’s shopping trip for his forthcoming Japan visit should include a suggestion that Tokyo, at long last, should recognise minimum standards of international decency. Or do we care more about whales than about humans?

COMPARED WITH the two tough old soldiers inspected above, the third of this trio of books is a raw recruit, but a welcome reinforcement to the ranks. It is aptly entitled Forgotten Anzacs, and Peter Ewer’s publisher (no doubt by the merest coincidence) has got it on the field just in time for Anzac Day.

To most Australians and New Zealanders, “Anzac” instantly conveys Gallipoli and 1915. Few of us recall (if we ever knew) that the headquarters of another Anzac Corps opened on April 12, 1941, in the early stages of the Second World War. Its intended role was (with other Allied forces) to defend Greece against Nazi invasion overland from the north. The British operation was a disaster from conception, and was foreseen as such by the higher command. Greece and Crete cost Australia some 600 dead; 5000 of our men spent four weary years in German prison camps.

By one of history’s weirder ironies, the architect of this military failure was also the author of the even greater schemozzle of Gallipoli—Winston Churchill. His intention in 1941 was to create for the eyes of the world a demonstration of British strength and steadfastness. One of his most senior generals remarked dryly that a rout rarely impressed anyone. Yet, to Field Marshal Wavell, Churchill insisted that it was a “glorious episode in the history of Britain”.

In respect of Greece–Crete, Churchill’s behaviour was shabby throughout. He blindsided Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, allowed Wavell to deceive the Anzac Corps commander General Blamey, and promised the swift and safe evacuation of our men if the Greek campaign should turn out badly; when the crunch came, he abandoned them all without a second thought.

Peter Ewer has covered the sources thoroughly. He has absorbed the balance and the wisdom of Gavin Long’s 600-page Greece, Crete and Syria (volume two of Long’s magisterial official war history). He has also studied the basic and personally authoritative content of General Sydney Rowell’s autobiography, Full Circle. Rowell was chief-of-staff to Blamey as Anzac Corps commander. When, years later, Rowell was writing his book as a retired Chief of the Australian General Staff, I had the advantage—indeed the honour—of many hours earnest (and often moving) conversations with him about Greece.

As the Allied campaign sagged, Blamey became a less and less effective corps commander, never once visiting the battle area. Finally losing both patience and respect, Rowell burst out: “You’re yellow, Tom! Just plain yellow!” Blamey, a vindictive hater, repaid that debt in New Guinea in 1942, when he dismissed Rowell from his command of New Guinea Force, just as the Kokoda tide was turning in our favour.

In the eyes of his own troops, Blamey’s ultimate dishonour came when he withdrew his own son from the battle, to favour him with a seat on the crowded flyingboat sent to Athens to fly the top brass safely back to Egypt.

It was plain from the start that we had no chance against the Germans. Their armoured regiments quickly disposed of our few and inferior tanks. Their aircraft gave us a shocking introduction to the new military dimension of dive-bombers and paratroops on the battlefield while, for days on end, not a British aircraft appeared in the sky.

In general—there was the odd exception—the Australian units performed amazingly well, maintaining discipline even under the deep depression that clouds all retreats. The work of the 2/2 Field Regiment was a model for what fine artillery can do. But April 25, 1941, was a bitter Anzac Day, with our troops stumbling down the steep tracks to the beach in the hope of rescue. One bright spot was the successful evacuation—in Australia’s own destroyer Voyager—of 160 Australian nursing sisters.

To the end, ordinary Greeks maintained towards us their warmth and succour. When the war was over, not a few Australian soldiers made the journey back to see and to thank the Greek families who (at mortal risk of German reprisal) ensured their survival with a surreptitious chicken or half a dozen eggs on the quiet.

An honest balance-sheet of the Greece–Crete campaign would put every entry on the one side—the wrong one. Its distractions prevented what would have been a quick and victorious “stitch-up” in North Africa; this detained our 9th Division in Tobruk when we needed it at home against the Japanese; our lost dead and prisoners weakened Australia’s general military strength; the Mediterranean saw the end of many naval units gravely needed in the Pacific.

Attempts to extenuate Greece and Crete urge that it may have been intended to procure a critical delay of “Barbarossa”—Hitler’s climactic assault on the Soviet Union. Of this, Peter Ewer is sceptical, and so am I. It looks like a quick coat of whitewash to me.

There was much about this sad adventure which Churchill and the British staff might well have been glad to forget, and they made a thorough job of it; they meanly did not even strike a Greek campaign medal, which would at least have given visible recognition to the troops who had honourably borne the heat of it. Forgotten Anzacs, indeed!

Apart from the intrinsic merit of a tale told in its own right, Ewer’s book offers contemporary wisdom: any alliance between a great military power and a much smaller one is always an uncertain quantity. An overmighty ally can—and often does—swamp the real interests of the junior partner. We saw something of this in the 1940s, when General MacArthur usually treated us as the local kid in short pants. Australia’s alliance today with the USA, though vital, is not immune from similar risks. For a small military power, “alliance management” must be a significant discipline in its own right.

Excellent though it is, Forgotten Anzacs is in one respect not yet worthy to stand shoulder-to-shoulder on a full-dress parade with Pompey Elliott and Prisoners of the Japanese. Indeed, it should be sent back to boot camp for further training. Although it is decently designed and printed, it seems largely to have escaped proper editorial attention. It abounds with infelicities, repetitions and even wrong words. (Damaged roads and bridges surely are repaired, not “reparated”.) The spectacle of a lieutenant commander—a naval rank—in charge of an infantry battalion is a jolt even for the most unmilitary reader. Ordinary misprints are too numerous to count, and the index is an affront.

These are more than quibbles: while the odd slip in any book must be accepted as one of life’s inescapable imperfections, consistent carelessness saps confidence in any book’s general integrity—an unkind fate for one which is otherwise so valuable as this one.

Peter Ryan has written about his war experiences in New Guinea in Fear Drive My Feet (Duffy & Snellgrove).